revisiting morris’s socialist internationalism: rexections ... · refugees in fitzroy square, set...

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Revisiting Morris’s socialist internationalism: reXections on translation and colonialism (with an annotated bibliogra-phy of translations of News from Nowhere, 1890–1915)

Owen Holland

A number of recent critical endeavours have attempted to map the international reception of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde, as well as the utopian writings of H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy.1 Bellamy’s international inXuence, in particular, has long been recognised owing to Sylvia E. Bowman’s edited collection of essays on Edward Bellamy Abroad (1962). By contrast, attempts to chart the international dissemination of William Morris’s utopian romance News from Nowhere (1890), have extended little further than an oVhand remark by J.W. Mackail, in his 1899 biography of Morris. Here, Mackail noted a ‘curious fact’ about News from Nowhere, remarking that ‘this slightly constructed and essentially insular romance has, as a Socialist pamphlet, been translated into French, German and Italian, and has probably been more read in foreign countries than any of [Morris’s] more important works of prose and verse’.2

In fact, Mackail missed the existence of Swedish, Dutch and Russian transla-tions and would perhaps have been disconcerted to see further versions appear-ing between 1900 and 1915 in German, French, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Serbian and Norwegian.3 Carl Guarneri points out that, in the case of Bellamy, the variety of international responses surveyed in Bowman’s collection ‘aYrm that Looking Backward became a transnational intervention, a treatise in the form of Wction that joined an ongoing international debate about

reflect ions on tra nsl at ion and colon ial i sm

the future of industrial society’. Given the largely unnoticed and critically unex-amined array of translations of News from Nowhere, the same could also be said for Morris’s utopian romance, with the obvious ideological diVerence that the impact of Bellamy’s treatise was, according to Guarneri, most ‘discernible in shaping an international community of reformist socialists in the two decades after its publication’, whereas Morris’s intervention was uncompromisingly revo-lutionary.4

In Morris’s view, the society depicted in Looking Backward represented only ‘the beginning of [the revolution’s] militant period’ and was guilty of numerous ‘errors and fallacies’.5 Mackail’s slightly aggrieved tone in noting the transna-tional reception of News from Nowhere is indicative of the values he brought to bear when estimating the relative ‘importance’ of Morris’s works. Mackail privileged the ‘aesthetic’ over the ‘political’, drawing up a Manichean dichotomy between the two terms, and thus failed to consider the possibility that News from Nowhere travelled more extensively than, say, The Earthly Paradise or Morris’s late prose romances precisely because it belonged to and helped to consolidate a shared political imaginary of social revolution. In recovering this context, I sug-gest some possible openings for new readings of Morris’s utopian text, grounded in a reconstruction of its signiWcance in the intellectual history of the late nine-teenth- and early twentieth-century socialist movement, not only in Britain, but across most of Europe as well.

It is clear that members of the international socialist movement were respon-sible for most of the early translations. Those of Natalie Liebknecht in Ger-many, Pierre Georget La Chesnais in France, Juan José Morato in Spain, Ruggero Panebianco in Italy, Henri Polak and Frank van der Goes in the Netherlands, Carl Natanael Carleson in Sweden, Elise Ottesen in Norway, J. K. Kari in Finland, Dušan Bogosavljević in Serbia and Toshihiko Sakai in Japan were all published by houses aYliated to socialist parties and/or labour movements in their respec-tive countries. Such a politicised network of distribution qualiWes recent critical assessments of Morris’s utopianism, which focus on its nationally circumscribed content. The apparent contradiction between the strident internationalism of Morris’s political rhetoric and the comparatively limited national scope of his utopian vision appears in a diVerent light when News from Nowhere is seen in this transnational context. Before undertaking my re-assessment, however, it is important to establish some sense of what ‘internationalism’ meant to Morris, along with his contemporaries in the Socialist League and the wider Wn de siècle socialist movement.

In the historiography of the socialist movement, the ‘national question’, and its relationship to socialist internationalism, is notoriously vexed and contested.6

Internationalism could, for example, be taken to refer to the processes of capital-ist globalisation, cutting across national boundaries, which Marx invoked when

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describing ‘commodities’ as the ‘heavy artillery with which [the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls’ in pursuit of proWt. After a series of public debates between Ernest Belfort Bax and the Radical politician Charles Bradlaugh, Morris echoed Marx’s comments and admonished Bradlaugh for failing to comprehend ‘the international character of modern capitalism’, as well as his concomitant failure to ‘grasp that if capitalism is international, the foe that threatens it, the system which is put forward to take its place, must be international also’.7

Elsewhere, Morris was at pains to distinguish socialist internationalism from the ‘free trade’ internationalism he identiWed with the Manchester School economics of John Bright and Richard Cobden. As he put it in Commonweal (1887):

Mr. Bright’s Internationalism is, and always has been, a very one-sided matter, as one-sided as his love of peace. The Internationalism of bourgeois interests is what he is enthusiastic for, and in that cause he would try to join all the nations in the world, ignoring the fact that each nation is composed of two other nations, the nation of the poor and the nation of the rich.8

Morris’s opposing version of internationalism derived from the traditions of working-class solidarity and anti-imperialism dating from the International Workingmen’s Association, or First International (1864–1876). He attended the founding congress of its successor organisation, the Second International, in Paris in 1889, and left a useful record of his ‘Impressions of the Paris Congress’. It is possible that Morris formed contacts at this conference which subsequently led to production of numerous translations of News from Nowhere. His short report on the conference for Commonweal oVers an indication of the extent of the late nineteenth-century socialist movement’s implantation and relative density in diVerent national contexts: ‘[t]he numbers of the delegates Wrst taken’, Mor-ris wrote, ‘were as follows: French, 180; Germans, 81; English, 21; Belgian, 14; Austrian, 8; Italian, 11; Russian, 6; Swiss, 6; Denmark, 3; Roumania, 4; Spain, 2; Poland, 4; Hungary, 3; America, 2; Portugal, 1; Greece, 1; Holland, 4; Sweden, 1; Norway, 1’.9

As far as I have been able to trace, translations of News from Nowhere appeared between 1890 and 1915 in both book- and serial-form in ten of the nineteen coun-tries listed by Morris where the socialist movement possessed an organisational nucleus. J.K. Kari’s Finnish translation also appeared in 1900 under the auspices of the Työväen Kustannusosakeyhtiö [Workers’ Publishing Company], while an anonymous Czech translation appeared in Prague in 1900 via Právo Lidu [the Right of the People]. Subsequent translations also appeared in Japanese and Ser-bian. The congress itself played an instrumental role in helping the movement to consolidate its self-conception as a transnational movement. Morris attested that the congress was ideologically productive in engendering a spirit of internation-

alism, noting that ‘the mere presence of so many Socialists come together from so many countries so earnest and eager was inspiriting and encouraging’.10

Morris also possessed a network of international contacts and friendships in London which helped to form his political imagination after his entry into the socialist movement in 1883. Many such contacts were people in Xight from persecution for political activity by autocratic regimes on the continent, or in Tsarist Russia. In July 1885, Morris wrote to Gilbert Ifold Ellis requesting a copy of the Russian nihilist Sergius Stepniak’s book Russia Under the Tsars (1885), along with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and the German socialist August Bebel’s Woman in the Past, Present and Future, published by the Modern Press in an English translation in 1885. Morris had already read Stepniak’s Underground Russia (1882), which he described as ‘a most interesting book, though terrible reading’.11

Morris came to know Stepniak well, as well as another exiled Russian anar-chist, Peter Kropotkin. His own ‘rather long-winded sketch of my very unevent-ful life’ was written for the Austrian refugee and fellow socialist Andreas Scheu. He also helped to fund Louise Michel’s International School for the children of refugees in Fitzroy Square, set up during the 1890s.12 Michel, a French commu-nard who had been exiled in the wake of the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, had arrived in London after a lengthy period in New Caledonia. Such contacts and friendships helped teach Morris about the global dimensions of the political struggle in which he had begun to participate.

In organisational terms, the formation of the Socialist League was met with fraternal greetings from socialists across Europe: Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel and Karl Kautsky wrote from Germany, the Russian exile Pierre LavroV and Paul Lafargue, the leader of the Parti Ouvrier Français, from France, as did the exiled Hungarian socialist, Leo Frankel. Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis sent greetings from the Netherlands. In his editorial introduction to the 1887 vol-ume of Commonweal, Morris wrote that ‘[i]n every country of the civilised world there is a deWnite, strong, and increasing Socialist party […]. From all directions come tidings of good cheer’. The newspaper had kept up its regular ‘Record of the International Movement’ column during the intervening period. The ‘sepa-rate radical counterpublic’ and ‘subcultural networks’ which Elizabeth Carolyn Miller identiWes with the socialist periodicals circulating in late-Victorian Britain also possessed a transnational dimension, motivated in no small part by a shared ideological commitment to a politics of worldwide solidarity and working-class internationalism.13

It is important to consider the signiWcance of this international political net-work for the reception of News from Nowhere. The array of translations produced within the sub-cultural orbit of the Second International anticipated the vision described by Old Hammond in which ‘the whole system of rival and contend-


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ing nations […] has disappeared along with the inequality betwixt man and man in society’.14 Internationalism, for Morris and his fellow socialists, was both an ideological goal to be aspired towards in a putatively post-capitalist future and a material practice of solidarity, correspondence, friendship and collective organisation.

In his perceptive collection of essays on the relationship between socialist internationalism and the national question, Michael Löwy notes that the feeling of national identity, or attachment to a national culture, ought not to be confused with the more problematical ideological matter of nationalism, which, he sug-gests, demands supreme loyalty to the nation-state. Löwy further suggests that it is the task of socialist internationalists, in particular, to ‘fuse the historical and cultural heritage of the world socialist movement with the culture and tradition of their people, in its radical and subversive dimension – often […] hidden and buried by the oYcial culture of the ruling classes’.15 Internationalism, as Löwy construes it, should not be taken to mean the subsumption of national diVer-ences. Rather, it implies recognition of the historically conditioned existence of the nation-state, and the possibility that the category of the nation might be reduced to a primarily cultural dimension, set against its currently dominant economic and political determinations.

Löwy’s formulation of the cultural mediation of national identity is particu-larly relevant to News from Nowhere. In an addition to chapter fourteen of the 1891 version in book form, the narrator, William Guest, enquires about ‘relations with foreign nations’, prompting Old Hammond’s response about the disappear-ance of national rivalries. Hammond seems to imply that the market-orientated global collection of competing nation-states has given way to an international system of federated but autonomous communes, echoing the Socialist League Manifesto which aimed to win a world in which ‘there are no nations, but only varied masses of workers and friends’. Guest goes on to ask whether this makes the world a ‘duller’ place, hinting at an anxiety about global subsumption of the local whereby national diVerences are erased through homogenisation, and he is told to ‘cross the water and see’. Hammond refers to ‘the landscape, the building, the diet, the amusements’ and ‘costume’ as markers of national diVerences which persist.16 ‘Nations’ seem to have ‘disappeared’ and yet the presence of the Irish and Welsh languages suggests that certain kinds of culturally mediated national identity continue to prevail:

sometimes even before [the children] can read, they can talk French, which is the nearest language talked on the other side of the water; and they soon get to know German also, which is talked by a huge number of colleges and communes on the mainland. These are the principal languages we speak in these islands, along with English or Welsh, or Irish, which is another form of Welsh.17

Eric Hobsbawm has characterised the period between 1870 and 1914 as one in which ‘the ethnic-linguistic criterion for deWning a nation […] became domi-nant’ – so Morris was, at one level, very much in tune with contemporary devel-opments. In much of his journalism, Morris also strongly supported the demand for Irish Home rule, adding a warning, with reference to the experience of Italian uniWcation during the mid-nineteenth century, that national liberation without the international abolition of class society would be liable to institute a new form of the old domination.18 Restoration of the Irish language only became an important issue in the Irish Nationalist movement after the formation of the Gaelic League in 1893.

Acknowledging his own sense of Welsh national identity, Morris wrote to Henry Richard in 1882: ‘since [my parents] were both of Welsh parentage on both sides, I think I may lay claim to be considered one of the Cymry: I am I assure you very proud of my nation, and its lovely ancient literature as far as I know it by translations, since unfortunately I only know a very few words of the diYcult but beautiful language of my forefathers’.19 So Morris clearly respected the Welsh language, even though he did not speak it, much as he valued the right of national self-determination for the Irish.

As such, Morris’s internationalism should be distinguished from that of his German socialist contemporary, Karl Kautsky. In an 1887 article for the German Social Democratic Party’s theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit – the same news-paper in which Natalie Liebknecht’s German translation of News from Nowhere appeared four years later – Kautsky predicted that, with the advent of socialism,

Schmerzlos werden die Nationen in einander aufgehen, etwa wie heute die rhae-toromanische Bevoelkerung Graubuendens unmerklich und ohne Murren all-maelig sich germanisiert, weil sei es fuer vorteilhafter Wndet, eine Sprache zu sprechen, die Jedermann in weitem Umkreise versteht, als eine, die nur in weni-gen Thaelern gesprochen wird.20

[… the nations will painlessly fuse with each other, more or less in the same fash-ion as the Romansh-speaking inhabitants of the Graubünden canton in Switzer-land, who, insensibly and without complaint, are slowly germanising themselves as they discover that it is more beneWcial to speak a language that everybody understands in the vast surrounding areas rather than a language that is only spoken in a few valleys.]

The anti-imperialist inXection of Morris’s internationalism also set him at odds with some fellow socialists in Britain, including the leader of the Socialist Democratic Federation, Henry Mayers Hyndman, and the editor of the popu-lar Clarion newspaper, Robert Blatchford. Unlike Morris, both Hyndman and Blatchford were given to making overtly jingoistic and pro-imperialist remarks


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in their socialist writings.21

Assessing the fragile perseverance of an anti-imperialist current of socialist internationalism during the late twentieth century, Löwy writes that

internationalism is not the expression of the identity in the life conditions of the exploited and oppressed of all countries, but of a dialectical relationship between at least three very diVerent kinds of struggles: the socialist labour movement in advanced capitalist societies; social and national liberation movements in dependent (or colonial) capitalist countries; and movements for democracy and against market ‘reforms’ in the former Eastern Bloc countries.22

With the obvious exception of the reference to the now non-existent ‘second world’ of the former USSR, Löwy’s formulation usefully suggests some points of convergence with Morris’s own internationalist stance, located as it was in the early agitation of the socialist movement in one of the leading capitalist countries of the late nineteenth century.

As we have noted, an important preoccupation of many Wn de siècle social-ists involved solidarity with the Irish struggle for national liberation (or ‘Home Rule’) from the British Empire. Morris was one of the movement’s foremost propagandists and there is a consistently internationalist emphasis in much of his political journalism and his many public lectures. The Manifesto of the Socialist League, the organisation to which Morris gave his time and funds between 1884 and 1890, boldly declared its commitment to the ‘principles of Revolutionary International Socialism’. Nor is it diYcult to Wnd rhetorical formulations of an internationalist political perspective in Morris’s socialist journalism of the 1880s. For instance, in his review of Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), he argues that ‘modern nationalities are mere artiWcial devices for the commercial war that we [socialists] seek to put an end to, and will disappear with it’. The vision is realised in News from Nowhere. Similarly, in ‘The Policy of the Socialist League’ (1888), Morris wrote that ‘in the society of the future, nations as political entities will cease to exist, and give place to the federation of communities bound together by locality or convenience’. The internationalism of the League, he suggests, was what distinguished its political position from those ‘Socialists who cannot see so far as the abolition of nationality’ – a remark aimed at Fabian gradualists and jingo socialists such as Hyndman.23 Morris’s understanding of communism, then, clearly did not entail a vision of ‘socialism in one country’.

Given Morris’s professed internationalism, various commentators have unsurprisingly called attention to the peculiarly national scope of the political vision outlined in News from Nowhere, echoing Mackail’s emphasis on the text’s apparent insularity. In his excellent commentary on chapter XVII of News from Nowhere, John Crump poses an important criticism of Morris’s conceptualisa-tion of revolution. ‘One problem raised by Morris’s account of “how the change

came” ’, Crump observes, ‘is that he limits his description to the conWnes of a single nation-state’. Old Hammond makes no reference to the response of other capitalist nation-states – in Europe, the USA, or elsewhere. Philip E. Wegner makes a similar point to Crump in his discussion of the divergence between Morris’s views and Bellamy’s on the desirability of ‘resuscitating elements of the national cultural past’. For Wegner, Morris’s utopianism manifests a ‘deep faith in the fundamental continuity of the English past and present’.24

Philip Steer echoes both Crump and Wegner in pointing out that ‘Morris […] articulates a fundamentally national vision’ bound up with a ‘contraction of political terrain that seeks to retrace the nation’s steps back into the past’.25 The network of the Second International, which provided a politicised channel of distribution and reception for News from Nowhere, partly answers Crump’s objection and forces us to reconsider the characterisations oVered by Wegner and Steer. Taken together, the array of translations provides one way of trying to resolve, or force through, some of the apparent limitations in Morris’s interna-tionalism as it is represented in News from Nowhere. The proliferation of transla-tions in overtly politicised milieux oVers a concrete example of one way in which the text transcended its own immediate national context.

Grappling with the diYculty of mediating between the national and the international, Terry Eagleton has suggested how the ‘powers released by [a] national revolution’ can ‘begin to warp the global space of capitalism and fashion unpredictable new internationalist conjunctures, blasting the national revolu-tion out of the temporal continuum of the nation itself and into another space altogether’.26 The problem faced by those seeking to ‘fashion’ what Eagleton calls ‘internationalist conjunctures’ is how to supersede the form of the nation-state at the global level, while continuing to work through the content of the struggles engendered by the form in each particular national context. In Morris’s case, News from Nowhere envisions the unfolding of a revolutionary process in Britain, but the translation of the text blasts it out of its own immediate context and into ‘another space altogether’. The means of distribution is particularly signiWcant given that the Second International was a subversive political formation, sections of which were committed to bringing about the kind of revolutionary upheaval which Morris portrayed. Tanya Agathocleous has commented on the similarly international ‘conditions of production’ of The Communist Manifesto, pointing to its having been ‘[p]ublished in several languages and addressed to an interna-tional audience’ as evidence of its status as ‘an example of the new Weltliteratur heralded by Marx and Engels’.27 Agathocleous follows Martin Puchner’s recent discussion of the Manifesto as a novel departure in ‘world literature’:

[w]ritten from the point of view of the international, countryless proletariat, the Manifesto hopes to create its addressee through its own international, literary


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practice. In much the same way, the Manifesto is the pinnacle of bourgeois world literature and wants to transform this world literature, performatively, into a diVerent world literature, a new world literature in the making.

The political network of distribution which mediated the European reception of Morris’s utopia also demands, pace Puchner, ‘that we accept the reality of translation and translatability not just as something that happens to originals but as something that structures these originals as well’.28 Translation enabled Mor-ris’s utopian romance to transcend its immediate spatial and temporal horizons, transforming its nationally circumscribed content by making it available in a variety of diVerent national localities.

A more thoroughgoing account of the text’s reception in each particular national context might thus begin to answer the reservations of Crump, and Steer, both of whom correctly identify the nationally-delimited content of Mor-ris’s utopia, but who do not consider the way in which translation lends the text a certain kind of portability. While Bellamy scholars are well served by the essays collected in Bowman’s Bellamy Abroad, no comparable collection exists for News from Nowhere.29 This is an unfortunate critical lacuna, especially given that the constellation of translations supplied in my accompanying bibliography sug-gests the comparably transnational scope of Morris’s publication. At least some of those who translated News from Nowhere, however, are likely to have been opposed to the evolutionary gradualism of Bellamy’s version of socialism, as was Morris. If, as Carl Guarneri suggests, dissemination of Bellamy’s utopia shored up the Xank of Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism during the debates which raged in the Second International during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth cen-turies, Morris’s utopia can safely be assumed to have given succour to those who, like Bax, opposed Bernstein’s gradualist, evolutionary stance.30 It is thus unsur-prising that Bernstein’s response to News from Nowhere was guardedly critical. After having leafed through an English-language edition of Morris’s book while staying in London, he remarked in a letter to Karl Kautsky, dated 16 March 1892 and sent from Upper Holloway, that:

Ich kann diese Utopien nicht verdauen, man lernt nichts daraus, und zur Unter-haltung dient ein guter Roman besser. Wenigstens geht es mir so, andere haben das Buch sehr gelobt. Nur den Anfang habe ich durchXogen, und da muß ich sagen, daß er im Englischen eines gewissen poetischen Duftes nicht entbehrte. Aber späterhin war es, soviel ich beim Durchblättern merkte, im Grunde nur Cabet redivivus mit etwas Anarchismus verquickt.31 [I Wnd these utopias quite indigestible, you don’t learn anything from them and a good novel is more entertaining. At least that’s how it strikes me: others have

greatly praised the book. I only skimmed through the beginning of it and I have to admit there is a certain poetic Xavour there in English. Further into it, though, it struck me, insofar as I could tell from leaWng through, as essentially no more than re-heated Cabet mixed with a bit of anarchism.]

Given Bernstein’s developing revisionism, it is clear why he might have objected to the idea that any political lessons could be drawn from Morris’s utopian text. For Bernstein, ‘the movement was everything, the Wnal aim nothing’, elevating (reformist) means as an end-in-itself against the commitment to revolutionary rupture advocated by Morris and others.32

Bernstein had been partly inXuenced by the British Fabians, whose ideas Mor-ris frequently criticised. Bernstein argued that gradual economic progress would ensure peaceful social reform and transformation, thus obviating the need for socialists to pursue the kinds of militant tactics and revolutionary strategy out-lined in Morris’s chapter on ‘How the Change Came’.33 The vision of revolution presented there is, as numerous commentators have pointed out, clearly iden-tiWed with a Wctionalised version of nineteenth-century London, replete with familiar landmarks and buildings, inviting Crump’s criticism. However, Morris’s place-conscious and localist evocation of revolutionary struggle against capital-ism need not rule out the capacity of the text to inspire the political imaginations of readers in diVerent geographical (or temporal) situations.

The text Wrst appeared, in its serialised form in Commonweal, in the same year in which annual May Day demonstrations – which Hobsbawm describes as ‘the most visceral and moving institution asserting working-class international-ism’ – were inaugurated. The occasion is still marked in Nowhere. Guest learns about the ‘solemn feast’ held ‘[o]nce a year, on May-day […] in those easterly communes of London to commemorate The Clearing of Misery, as it is called’.34

As Old Hammond puts it:

On that day we have music and dancing, and merry games and happy feasting on the site of some of the worst of the old slums, the traditional memory of which we have kept. On that occasion the custom is for the prettiest girls to sing some of the old revolutionary songs, and those which were the groans of the discontent [including Thomas Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’], on the very spots where those ter-rible crimes of class-murder were committed day by day for so many years.35

The May-day festivities in Nowhere suggest one of the ways in which Morris’s vision of a future communist society is aYliated in its habits and social rituals to the nineteenth-century institutions of working-class internationalism described by Hobsbawm. Similarly, in the serial instalment of News from Nowhere pub-lished in Commonweal on 24 May 1890, which prints a section of ‘How the Change Came’, Morris’s text is wrapped around Walter Crane’s cartoon, ‘Solidar-


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ity of Labour: Labour’s May Day, Dedicated to the Workers of the World’. Crane depicts workers from Asia, Africa, America, Australia and Europe holding hands in a dance around a liberated globe inscribed with a banner reading ‘Solidarity of Labour’. As is only too obvious, the course of world history took a dramatically diVerent path from that envisaged by Morris.

Hobsbawm points out that during the years leading up to 1914, ‘the force of working-class uniWcation within each nation inevitably replaced the hopes and theoretical assertions of working-class internationalism, except for a noble minority of militants and activists’.36 Until his death in 1896, Morris was part of that militant minority. Dissemination of his utopian romance through the ranks of the Second International indicates both its role in ideological production (on the anti-revisionist, revolutionary Xank) and the material conditions of the text’s internationalism. This requires us to re-assess the assumptions made about the content of Morris’s utopian vision which assert its national limits.

Gregory Claeys has argued, like Crump, that News from Nowhere ‘might well appear to be the apotheosis of the “Little England” ideal’. Claeys considers the way in which Morris’s vision of Nowhere as a ‘garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoiled’, along with its rejection of the world market and inter-national trade, lends credence to the ‘proposition that Morris was a vigorous supporter of a “Little Englander” vision of socialism’. The term, as Claeys points out, had previously gained notoriety in relation to Positivist anti-imperial agita-tion in the writings of E.S. Beesly and Frederic Harrison during the 1880s. Beesly, and Harrison, disowned Britain’s colonial territories in the name of national self-suYciency and isolationism. Morris’s own stance was slightly more complicated. Like his comrade Ernest Belfort Bax, who had attended Positivist meetings in his youth, Morris inherited the anti-imperialist animus of Beesly and Harrison and opposed British colonial policy in India.37 The politicised anti-imperialism of Morris’s journalistic critiques, however, did not dovetail neatly with a straight-forwardly anti-colonialist stance.

For instance, the extent to which decolonisation can actually be said to have taken place in Nowhere is ambiguous. What is to be inferred from Old Ham-mond’s remark that ‘we have helped to populate other countries – where we wanted and were called for’? Hammond is more explicit when he points out that ‘[t]hose lands which were once the colonies of Great Britain […] and especially America […] are now and will be for a long while a great resource to us’. Ham-mond’s comments seriously weaken the claim that News from Nowhere presents a ‘Little England’ vision of socialism, shorn of its international ties and colonial inheritance, in which ‘priority [is given] to self-suYciency’.38 Hammond’s refer-ence is in the past tense (‘were once’), but it is ambiguous nonetheless. It could, for example, signal the supersession of Great Britain as a nation-state while leav-ing open the possibility of a comparable structure of colonial exploitation given

the suggestion that the territories remain ‘a great resource to us’. Hammond’s problematic valorisation of a colonial structure of feeling presupposes the persist-ence of a deWned ‘centre’ or metropole – ‘us’ as separate from ‘them’ – occluding the possibility that any actualisation of an international socialist community might involve a more fundamentally de-centring kind of multi-polarity.

This is no mere slip of the tongue on Hammond’s part, as it accords with views which Morris advocated in his journalism. In ‘Emigration and Colonisation’, published in Commonweal on 31 December 1887, Morris wrote:

… our younger Socialist readers must not suppose that Socialists object to per-sons or groups changing their country, or fertilising the waste places of the earth. Granted that society really were the sacred thing it should be, instead of the mass of anomalies and wrongs that it is, the Roman idea of leading a colony is right and good, and it will surely be one of the solemn duties of the society of the future for a community to send out some band of its best and hardiest people to socialise some hitherto neglected spot of earth for the service of man.39

Precisely where such ‘waste places’ and ‘neglected’ tracts of land are located, Morris failed to specify. Moreover, it is diYcult to reconcile Morris’s praise for the ‘Roman idea of leading a colony’ with the critical narrative exposition of Roman imperial expansion which he would go on to produce in The House of the WolWngs in 1888. In an earlier article, dated 5 June 1886, criticising nineteenth-century patterns of coerced emigration and expatriation, he wrote: ‘Let us think of organised emigration when we shall be able to Wnd freedom before us and leave freedom behind us; not till then’. Morris was critical of British imperial-ist interventions in Afghanistan, Sudan, Burma, Egypt and Tibet, and it is also possible to Wnd scattered criticisms of British colonial policy in India and Hong Kong in his journalism.40

These remarks, however, suggest Morris’s willingness in his political journal-ism and in his utopian romance to countenance a colonial structure of feeling, placing him closer to the positions which Claeys identiWes with Hyndman and Blatchford. This point, in turn, obliges us to acknowledge that a key part of Löwy’s formulation of socialist internationalism is problematised in Morris’s ver-sion, namely, the importance of solidarity with ‘national liberation movements in dependent (or colonial) capitalist countries’. The Wn de siècle socialist move-ment had not yet witnessed the twentieth-century national liberation and anti-colonial struggles of the ‘third world’, reminding us that Morris’s historically-situated socialist ‘internationalism’ was a product of its Eurocentric times.41

Colonialist ideas were not uncommon in other sections of the socialist move-ment and in the wider Second International. The German socialist August Bebel’s popular exposition of socialist doctrines in Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879), Wrst translated into English in 1885, envisaged colonialism as one potential means


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of resolving the perceived problem of overpopulation which Malthus had elabo-rated in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). In terms similar to Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, Bebel wrote that ‘[t]he most fruitful and luxuriant countries of the world are lying entirely or almost entirely waste, because they cannot be made arable and cultivated by a few hundreds or thousands; nothing short of an en masse colonization of many millions can avail to carry the day against the extravagant exuberance of nature’. Bebel speculated that the plains of South and Central America would be ripe for such colonisation, without considering how such migration might aVect the indigenous population. Bebel’s vision of a ‘new community […] built up on an international basis’ was limited to a ‘great federation’ of ‘civilised nations’, a construction which implicitly re-inscribed the imperialist binary between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ peoples and customs. Mor-ris possessed and read a copy of H.B. Walthers’s English translation of Bebel’s Woman in the Past, Present and Future, which, along with the inXuence of Carlyle and Ruskin, played a formative role in his view of international relations in the projected socialist future.42

It is well-known that Carlyle and Ruskin were signiWcant Wgures in Morris’s intellectual development. Carlyle eulogised the potential of colonial emigra-tion in the conclusion to his essay, Chartism (1839), quoting some of Profes-sor Teufelsdröckh’s remarks from Book III, Chapter 4 of his earlier text, Sartor Resartus (1830–31). Emigration is Wgured as a means of displacing the forces of social conXict and class antagonism represented by the Chartists geographically. Ruskin, too, had proven himself a willing proponent of the ‘New Imperialism’ which emerged in Britain during the 1870s, arguing in the Wnal part of his Inau-gural Lecture as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in February 1870 that Britain must ‘found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; – seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these colonists that their chief virtue is to be Wdelity to their country’.43 Morris’s own advocacy of the idea of ‘leading a colony’ to fertilise the ‘waste places’ of the earth clearly owed more to Carlyle and Ruskin than it did to Bax or Marx.

The other source of Morris’s thinking regarding colonisation was Iceland, about which he kept journals of his visits there during 1871 and 1873. That Mor-ris viewed the history of ‘Norse colonization’ in a positive light is clear from the brief remarks he makes on the subject in his lecture on ‘The Early Literature of the North – Iceland’, which Eugene Lemire estimates was Wrst delivered in the lecture hall at Kelmscott House on 9 October 1887. Here, Morris refers to nineteenth-century Icelanders as the ‘representatives, a little mingled with Irish blood, of the Gothic family of the great Germanic race: their forefathers Xed before “the violence of kings and scoundrels” […] to save their free tribal customs for a while in that romantic desert’.44

In Morris’s rendition of the historical narrative, conXicts between the ‘tribal chiefs’ in feudal Norway in the time of King Harald Fairhair had led to a general exodus on the part of the ‘malcontent chiefs’ after the battle of HafrsWorð, with various chieftains emigrating to Russia, Normandy, England, Ireland and Scot-land. Those who went to Iceland were in a unique position, as Morris notes: ‘the land was uninhabited, they brought with them their tribal customs and tradi-tions and kept them for long together with their language: this of course was the deliberate intention of the emigrants’.45

Colonisation, in this instance, facilitated the preservation of cultural norms and traditions which Morris regarded as incipiently democratic, allowing him to trace a line of continuity from his historical reconstruction of the Wrst settle-ment of Iceland to the virtues of kindness, honesty and hospitality which he encountered amongst the people who inhabited the island during his visits there. Unlike the more problematical forms of colonial settlement envisaged by Bebel, Ruskin and Carlyle, Iceland was an unsettled tract of land. By the late nineteenth century, however, such an ideal of uninhabited ‘virgin’ territory was untenable; a point which led Joseph Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1899) to assert the separability of the ideal and the real.46

The brief suggestion that the vision of abundance in Nowhere might, in some way, be bound up with the persistence of an ‘ideal’ of colonial settlement points to a limitation in Morris’s internationalism. It is possible, given that Commonweal circulated throughout Europe, America and the colonies, that Morris incorpo-rated such references because of his awareness that he was also writing for an audience located in the colonies, and thus wished to incorporate such readers into the political community of international socialists that he hoped to create. On Christmas Day 1892, Olive Schreiner wrote from South Africa to her close friend Edward Carpenter telling him that ‘[e]veryone is very busy now reading Morris’s News from Nowhere’.47

Despite this, Hammond’s almost parenthetical admission that ‘we have helped to populate other countries’ points toward an unconscious complicity with what Anne McClintock has described as ‘the myth of the empty land’, a Wction which conceals and sustains the founding violence of any colonial gesture or practice.48 Both the heretofore overlooked transnational scope of News from Nowhere’s dissemination, and its problematic appraisal of a colonial structure of feeling suggest ways in which critical understanding of Morris’s internationalism should be partially revised. The array of translations seems to conWrm the pos-sibility that Morris’s romance was mobilised as part of a live ideological dispute which ran throughout the Second International during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, transcending the nationally circumscribed content of the text by functionalising it as part of a wider, transnational political polemic.

Mackail’s brief comment that News from Nowhere was translated ‘as a Socialist


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pamphlet’ is telling in this regard, not least because it accentuates the propagan-distic, as opposed to narrative, generic or aesthetic qualities of the text.49 Mackail was perhaps disturbed to think that Morris’s international reputation was being constructed primarily with reference to his militant socialist and ‘political’, as opposed to his ‘aesthetic’ identity, hence his griping about the insularity of News from Nowhere. He chose not to look too closely at some of the ways in which this ‘insularity’ was challenged by the text’s international distribution, which I have begun to recover here.

Annotated Bibliography of Translations ofNews from Nowhere, 1890–1915

Morris’s bibliographers have tended follow Mackail’s lead, working within a lim-ited national horizon. What follows is an attempt partly to redress this problem. In his otherwise superb Bibliography of William Morris (2006), Eugene LeMire acknowledges that he makes ‘no attempt […] to list or describe translations of Morris’s texts into other languages’. LeMire points out that ‘choices set limits, but limits must be set in order to deWne the task and to achieve an exhaustive account within the limits deWned’.50

LeMire’s bibliography is the most comprehensively researched since Temple Scott’s A Bibliography of the Works of William Morris, and Harry Buxton Forman’s The Books of William Morris (both 1897). It is thus interesting to note that Buxton Forman does make one brief reference to a translation of News from Nowhere, whereas LeMire does not. Buxton Forman felt that ‘[i]t is worth mentioning that, in 1895, News from Nowhere was printed in Italian at Milan under the title La Terra Promessa. It was translated by Ernestina d’Errico, and includes an amusing introduction and notes’.51

Of the translations I have been able to trace which appeared before publica-tion of Buxton Forman’s bibliography, d’Errico’s La Terra Promessa: Romanzo Utopistico [The Promised Land: A Utopian Romance] is the only one he cites. He does not mention Ruggero Panebianco’s 1893 Italian translation, which appeared under the title La Futura Rivoluzione Sociale: Ossia un Capitolo del Libro Un Paese che non Esiste, published by the UYcio della Lotta di Classe [the OYce of Class Struggle]. D’Errico’s translation, by contrast, is unusual insofar as it appeared outside the ranks of the socialist movement, suggesting the extent to which Morris’s early bibliographers were either ignorant about, or at pains to sup-press, the dissemination of his work in contexts outside bourgeois high cultural

milieux.52 The only analogous translation is Maria Feldmanowa’s Polish version, Wieści z Nikąd: Powieść Utopijna (1902), which also appeared outside the socialist movement, even if, once published, the text would have become available in such circles. Both d’Errico and Feldmanowa were professional translators, who also translated the works of Carlyle, Ruskin and Wilde.

Where LeMire avoids the issue of translation by acknowledging that it is beyond the scope of his study, national circumscription leads Robert Coupe into the realm of mistaken speculation. Coupe provides details of a serial edition of News from Nowhere which appeared in nineteen instalments between October 1901 and September 1903 in the American socialist magazine The Comrade: An Illustrated Socialist Monthly. This edition contains a series of Wne illustrations by the German illustrator Hans Gabriel Jentzsch, who was born in Dresden in 1862 and who provided work for German socialist periodicals such as Der Wahre Jacob. Coupe speculates that ‘[i]t is odd that a New York periodical would engage an artist living so far away to illustrate for them’, admitting that while ‘[h]e may have illustrated a previous German language serialization of News from Nowhere […] [a] prior edition actually seems unlikely, since one picture contains words in English’.53 As it happens, Jentzsch had, in fact, illustrated Natalie Liebknecht’s 1900 German translation, Kunde von Nirgendwo.

In the following bibliography of translations of News from Nowhere, I have included annotations supplying brief biographical particulars of the translators, along with details of any aYliation to the socialist and/or labour movements in their respective countries. Translations are grouped by language, and listed in chronological order from date of Wrst appearance.

dutch

‘Nieuwstijdingen van Uit Nergensland of Een Tijdperk van Rust’, Recht voor Allen, 13, 1891, Nos. 143 (June 20/21), 155, 161, 167, 173, 179, 185, 191, 203, 209, 215, 221, 233, 239, 245, 251, 257, 269, 281, 287, 293 (Dec 12/13).

‘Berichten Uit Nergensland, of Een Tijdperk van Rust. Eenige Hoofdstukken Uit Een Utopischen Roman Door’, trans. Henri Polak, De Diamant-bewerker, 3, 1892, Nos. 1 (Jan. 2), 2, 3, 4 (Feb. 15).

Nieuws uit Nergensoord, of Een Tijd van Rust: Eenige Hoofdstukken uit een Utopischen Roman, trans. Frank van der Goes, Amsterdam: Van Looy, 1897.

Henry Polak (1868–1943) was general secretary of the Diamond Workers’ Union of the Netherlands (ANDB) and a founding member of the Dutch Social Demo-cratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) in 1894. De Diamantbewerker [The Diamond Work-


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er] was the union’s news-magazine. Polak’s serialisation only ran to four issues before it was ended. Frank van der Goes (1859–1939) had been an editor, along with Mark Twain, of the literary magazine De Nieuwe Gids [The New Guide] dur-ing the 1880s. Goes left the anarchistic Social Democratic League (SDB) because of its anti-parliamentary stance in 1894 to become one of the twelve founding members of the SDAP. His Dutch-language serialisation of News from Nowhere ran from the summer of 1891 until December in the periodical Recht voor Allen [Justice for All], the organ of the SDB, but the series was suspended before the full text had appeared. A complete, book-form version of his translation was published in Amsterdam in 1897.

french

‘Nouvelles de Nulle Part, Ou Une Époque de Répit’, extracts published in La Société Nouvelle: Revue internationale, 8, 1892, pp. 148–165, 321–336, 500–509, 623–632, 783–793. The serialised text, which breaks oV at chapter 10, is available online: <http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Nouvelles_de_nulle_part_ou_une_époque_de_répit> [accessed 1 May 2014].

Nouvelles de Nulle Part, ou Une ère de Repos, Roman d’Utopie, trans. P.G. La Chesnais, 2 vols, Paris: Société Nouvelle de Librairie et d’Édition, 1902.

Pierre Georget La Chesnais (1865–1948) was a writer and literary critic with a par-ticular interest in Henrik Ibsen. He was also a socialist sympathiser who took part in the antiboulangiste agitation of the 1880s against the reactionary nationalist movement of General Georges Boulanger. Among his many books, La Chesnais published The Socialist Party in the Reichstag and the Declaration of War (1915). His translation of News from Nowhere appeared, in extracts, in La Société Nouvelle: Revue internationale, a journal edited in Paris and Brussels between 1884 and 1897. His translation appeared in full as numbers 11 and 12 of a series entitled ‘Bibliothèque socialiste’; the result of a partnership between the French poet and essayist Charles Péguy and the radical publisher Georges Bellais. The publishing venture was known as the Librairie Georges Bellais, which also published writ-ings by the French socialist Jean Jaurès. On La Société Nouvelle, see Timothy J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 94–99, and Stephen Eric Bronner, Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, pp. 13–14.

swed i sh

Nytt Från En Ny Värld Eller En Hvilans Tid, trans. C. N. Carleson, Stockholm: Socialdemokratiska Arbetarpartiet, 1892.

Carl Natanael Carleson (1865–1929) was a prominent member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and remained active in the socialist movement well into the twentieth century. When the Party split in the wake of the Bolshevik revolu-tion, Carleson sided with the left-communists and became one of the founding members of the Swedish Communist Party.

german

‘Kunde von Nirgendwo: Einige Kapitel Aus Einem Utopischen Roman’, Die Neue Zeit: Revue des geistigen und öVentlichen Lebens, Jg. XI, 1892–3, H. 1–20, S. 29–32, 59–64, 93–96, 124–128, 157–160, 187–192, 227–232, 257–264, 290–296, 323–328, 356–360, 387–392, 420–424, 450–456, 485–488, 514–520, 547–552, 579–584, 609–616, 640–648. The serialised text is available online via the Bibliothek de Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung: <http://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/populo/nz.pl#anfang> [last accessed 1 May 2014].

Kunde von Nirgendwo: Ein Utopischer Roman, trans. Natalie Liebknecht, with a Foreword by Wilhelm Liebknecht and illustrations by Hans Gabriel Jentzsch, Stuttgart: Dietz, 1900.

Neues Aus Nirgendland: Ein Zukunftsroman, trans. Paul Seliger, Leipzig: Her-mann Seemann, 1901.

Natalie Liebknecht (1839–1909) was a German revolutionary socialist married to Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900), one of the principal founding members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (SDAP). The SDAP existed between 1869 and 1875, whereupon it merged with the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV) to form the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD). Liebknecht’s German translation was serialised as a feuilleton between 1892 and 1893, in the eleventh annual volume of Die Neue Zeit [The New Times], the theo-retical journal of the SAPD. It later appeared in book form in 1900, with a short Foreword written by her husband. Further editions of this translation were pub-lished by party presses in 1914, 1919, 1920 and 1922. An alternative translation by Paul Seliger (1863–1935) was published in Leipzig in 1901, with further editions in 1902 and 1912. Seliger was a topographer who also translated a wide array of


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books from English and Italian into German. The Leipzig-based publisher Her-mann Seemann issued German translations of a number of Morris’s other works, including Hopes and Fears for Art and Signs of Change.

i tal i an

La Futura Rivoluzione Sociale: Ossia un Capitolo del Libro: ‘Un Paese che non Esiste’, trans. Ruggero Panebianco, Milano: UYcio della Lotta di Classe, 1893.

La Terra Promessa: Romanzo Utopistico Di William Morris, trans. Ernestina d’ Errico, Milano: Max Kantorowicz, 1895.

Ruggero Panebianco (1848–1930) was a socialist and a geologist who founded a Socialist League in Padua in 1893. He wrote a treatise on mineralogy, and was a partisan of Esperanto, which earned him a stern rebuke from Antonio Gramsci in 1918 in the pages of Avanti! Panebianco translated a single chapter of News from Nowhere (most probably ‘How the Change Came’). Lotta di Classe: giornale dei lavoratori Italiani (1892–98) was an organ of the Italian Socialist Party. A brief summary of its history (in Italian) can be found online at: http://91.212.219.213/browsie/testate/LottaDiClasse.html [last accessed 1 May 2014]. For further biographical information about Panebianco, see also: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ruggero-panebianco_(Dizionario-BiograWco) [last accessed 1 May 2014]. Ernestina d’Errico (1867–??) was a professional translator. In 1901, she married the socialist politician Ettore Ciccotti (1863–1939) and changed her name to Ernestina d’Errico-Ciccotti.

rus s i an

‘Vesti Niotkuda ili Epocha Scast’ja’, Russkaya Mysl’, 10, 1896, pp. 85–127.Vesti Niotkuda ili Epocha Scast’ja, trans. A.P., St. Petersburg: Delo, 1906.‘Vyesti Niotkuda’, Idyeal’Naya Zhizn’, nos. 1–5, 1907.

I have not been able to trace the identity of A.P. In 1896, the Wrst seven chapters of A.P.’s Russian translation appeared in a politically moderate journal entitled Russkaya Mysl [Russian Thought] (1880–1918), edited by Vukol M. Lavrov. A.P.’s translation was subsequently published in full in 1906. Another anonymous translation appeared in 1907, alongside that of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), in a journal named Idyeal’Naya Zhizn’ [Perfect Life], edited

by Mikhail Kaufman. The journal carried its serialisation of Morris’s text through its Wrst Wve issues between October and November 1907, whereupon it ceased publication. For discussion of Russian culture and utopianism in the wake of the failed 1905 revolution, see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 307 pp.

f inn i sh

Ihannemaa, trans. J. K. Kari, Turku: Työväen Kustannusosakeyhtiö [Workers’ Publishing Company], 1900.

Juho Kyösti Kari (1868–1921) was a teacher and a member of the Finnish Social Democratic Party. He was party treasurer between 1899 and 1905, and also later served as a member of parliament.

czech

Zvěsti z Nejsoucna, Čili, Epocha Míru v Několika Kapitolách z Utopického Románu, [trans. anon], Praha: Právo Lidu, 1900.

Právo Lidu [People’s Right] was the publishing house of the Czech Social Demo-cratic Workers’ Party. It was founded in Hradec Králové in 1893 as a local social democratic journal, and began to be issued in Humpolec in 1894. In 1897 the editors moved to Prague.

pol i sh

Wieści z Nikąd: Powieść Utopijna, trans. Maria Feldmanowa, Lwów: Księgarnia Polska, 1902.

Wieści z nikąd czyli Epoka spoczynku: kilka rozdziałów utopijnego romansu, trans. Wojciech Szukiewicz, Lwów: Księgarnia H. Altenberga, 1902.

Maria Feldmanowa (1874–1953) and Wojciech Szukeiwicz (1867–1944) were both professional translators.


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s pan i sh

Noticias de Ninguna Parte o Una Era de Reposo: Capítulos para una Novela Utópi-ca, trans. Juan José Morato, Barcelona: Casa Editorial M. Maucci, 1903.

Juan José Morato (1864–1938) was born in Madrid, and became a typographer before joining the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in 1882. He was a friend and collaborator of Pablo Iglesias Posse (1850–1925), founder of the PSOE. Morato also wrote several important works on the history of socialism in Spain, including A History of the Spanish Section of the International, 1868–1874 (1930).

j a panese

理想郷 [Risōkyō], abridged translation by Toshihiko Sakai, Tokyo: Heiminsha [平民社], Meiji 37 [1904].

Toshihiko Sakai (1871–1933) was a Japanese revolutionary socialist involved in founding Heiminsha, or the Commoners’ Society, a short-lived socialist organi-sation established in 1903 to focus on anti-war activities, agitating against Japan’s imperial expansion into Manchuria and Korea, as well as Japan’s war with Russia. Heiminsha was an aYliate of the Shakai Minshu-tō, or the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ), which had been founded in 1901 by Sen Katayama and others. Sakai also wrote for the weekly anti-war newspaper Heimin Shimbun. In 1922, he became one of the founding members of the underground Communist Party of Japan. See John Crump, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan, Lon-don: Croom Helm, 1983, pp. 106–113.

s erb i an

Vesti ni od kuda, trans. Dušan M. Bogosavljević, Beograd: S. Radenković i brat, Socijalistička knjižara, 1911.

Dušan Bogosavljević (1888–1957) was a teacher in Belgrade who is likely to have been a member of the Serbian Social Democratic Party founded in 1903. He also translated Bebel’s memoirs (1910). The Socijalistička knjižara [socialist bookshop] series published writings by Marx, Kautsky, Bebel, Otto Bauer, the Bulgarian revolutionary Christian Rakovsky (1873–1941), and Dragiša Lapčević (1867–1939), founder of the Serbian Social Democratic Party.

norweg ian

Drømmen om Fremtiden, trans. Elise Ottosen, Kristiania [Oslo]: Det Norske Arbeiderpartis Forlag, 1915.

Elise Ottesen (1886–1973), later Ottesen-Jensen, was a prominent libertarian socialist and a campaigner for women’s rights. She was a member of the syndical-ist trade union federation in Sweden, the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden (SAC), founded in 1910. Her Norwegian translation of News from Nowhere, entitled Drømmen om Fremtiden [A Dream of the Future], appeared under the imprint of the Norwegian Workers’ Party, formed in 1887.

notes

1. Thomas J. Tobin, ed, Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism, Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2005, 326 pp; Grace Brockington, ed, Inter-nationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009, 326 pp; Patrick Parrinder & John S. Partington, eds, The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe, London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2013, 419 pp; Carl J. Guarneri, ‘An American Utopia and Its Global Audiences: Transnational Perspectives on Looking Backward’, Utopian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2008, pp. 147–187 (afterwards Guarneri, ‘American Utopia’); Carl Guarneri, ‘Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: The International Impact of an American Socialist Utopia, 1888–1945’, in Mary Kemperink & Wille-mein Roenhorst, eds, Visualizing Utopia, Louvain: Peeters, 2007, pp. 1–29. See also, Stefano Evangelista, ed, The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, London: Continuum, 2010, 381 pp.

2. Sylvia E. Bowman, ed, Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet’s Influ-ence, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962, 543 pp; J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2 vols, London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1899, Vol. II, p. 243. (Afterwards Mackail)

3. Full details of this array of translations are given in my accompanying bibli-ography, which includes brief biographies of translators and their aYliations to the socialist/labour movement.

4. Guarneri, ‘American Utopia’, p. 150, p. 169. Morris’s antipathy to what he regarded as Bellamy’s technocratic gradualism is well-known and has been amply stated elsewhere in the pages of this Journal. See, for example, Stephen Coleman, ‘The Economics of Utopia: Morris and Bellamy Con-trasted’, Journal of the William Morris Society, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Spring 1989, pp. 2–6.


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5. Nicholas Salmon, ed, William Morris, Political Writings: Contributions to ‘Justice’ and ‘Commonweal’, 1883–1890, Bristol: Thoemmes, 1994, p. 420. (Hereafter Salmon, Political Writings)

6. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Real-ity, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Canto, 1992, pp. 124–6 (Afterwards Hobsbawm, Nationalism); Michael Forman, Nationalism and the International Labour Movement: The Idea of the Nation in Socialist and Anarchist Theory, Univer-sity Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, 216 pp. and Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984, 212 pp. For discussion of the national question in the Wn de siècle socialist movements in Britain and France, see Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998, 232 pp., and Robert Stuart, Marxism and National Identity: Socialism, Nationalism and National Socialism during the French Fin de Siècle, Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2006, 305 pp. For an illuminating discussion of how (and whether) a global left might ‘learn to speak together’ in the changed context of the early twenty-Wrst century, see Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Can There Be a Global Left?’, in Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, London: Verso, 2003, pp. 92–112.

7. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1848], with an introduction by David Harvey, London: Pluto Press, 2008, p. 39. For an account of the 1851 Great Exhibition as a consolidation of practices of capi-talist globalisation, see Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 249 pp. Recent readings of Bellamy’s Looking Backward similarly accentu-ate its transnational distribution as an early instance of American ‘cultural imperialism’, preWguring US-led consumerist globalisation. See Philip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation and the Spatial His-tories of Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 62–98 (afterwards Wegner), and Susan M. Matarese, ‘Foreign Policy and the American Self-Image: Looking Back at Looking Backward’, American Tran-scendental Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 1, 1989, pp. 45–54; Salmon, Political Writings, p. 267.

8. Nicholas Salmon, ed, William Morris, Journalism: Contributions to ‘Com-monweal’ 1885–1890, Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996, p. 275. (Hereafter Salmon, Journalism)

9. See Frits van Holthoon & Marcel van der Linden, eds, Internationalism in the Labour Movement: 1830–1940, 2 vols, Leiden: Brill, 1998; Salmon, Political Writings, pp. 431–440, p. 432. For histories of the Second International, see James Joll, The Second International, 1889–1914, rev. and extended edn, Lon-

don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974, 224 pp,. and George Novack, Dave Frankel & Fred Feldman, The First Three Internationals: Their History and Lessons, New York: PathWnder Press, 1974, 207 pp.

10. Salmon, Political Writings, p. 432.11. E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. edn, Lon-

don: Merlin Press, 1977, p. 306; Norman Kelvin, ed, The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols in 5, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984–1996, Vol. II, p. 194. (Afterwards Kelvin)

12. May Morris, ed, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, 2 vols, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936, Vol. II, p. 8; Linda Richardson, ‘Louise Michel and William Morris’, Journal of the William Morris Society, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Spring 1989, pp. 26–29. (Afterwards JWMS)

13. ‘Record of the International Movement’, Commonweal, Vol. 1, No. 2, March 1885, pp. 15–16. Commonweal has been digitalised and is available online in the General Collection of the University of Michigan: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=browse&c=genpub [accessed 1 May 2014]; Salmon, Political Writings, p. 217; Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture, Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2013, p. 25. (Afterwards Miller)

14. May Morris, ed, The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols, London: Longmans, Green &Co., 1910–15, Vol. XVI, p. 85. (Subsequently CW)

15. Michael Löwy, Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question, London: Pluto Press, 1998, p. 60. (Afterwards Löwy)

16. CW, XVI, p. 85; Salmon, Journalism, p. 7; CW, XVI, p. 85.17. CW, XVI, p. 30. Morris is of course famously incorrect here, in that while

Irish and Welsh are both Celtic languages, Irish is from the Goedilic branch of those languages (‘Q-Celtic’), and much closer to Manx and Scots Gaelic, whereas Welsh is from the Brythonic branch (‘P-Celtic’), and much more akin to Cornish and Breton (Ed.).

18. Hobsbawm, Nationalism, p. 102; Salmon, Political Writings, pp. 108–110.19. Kelvin, Vol. II, p. 101.20. Karl Kautsky, ‘Die moderne Nationalität’, Die Neue Zeit, vol. 5, nos. 9 &

10, 1887, pp. 392–405, 442–451 (451). I am grateful to Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan for assistance with the translation.

21. Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920, Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 140–59, 172–80 (afterwards Claeys). Morris dismissed Hyndman, in particular, as ‘rather a jingo than anything else’; Kelvin, Vol. II, p. 371.

22. Löwy, pp. 55–56.23. Salmon, Journalism, p. 3; Salmon , Political Writings, p. 425; CW, Vol. XVI,

p. 85; Salmon, Political Writings, p. 361; Ibid.


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24. John Crump, ‘How the Change Came: News from Nowhere and Revolu-tion’, in Stephen Coleman & Patrick O’Sullivan, eds, William Morris & News from Nowhere: A Vision for Our Time, Hartland: Green Books, 1990, pp. 57–73 (p. 68). Crump (ibid.) adds that the limitation may have been ‘lit-erary rather than ideological’, speculating that Morris perhaps ‘shrank from the diYcult task of attempting to portray the revolution on an international rather than a national scale’ in the context of a Wctional narrative; Wegner, p. 76; Ibid.

25. Philip Steer, ‘National Pasts and Imperial Futures: Temporality, Econom-ics, and Empire in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Julius Vogel’s Anno Domino 2000 (1889)’, Utopian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2008, pp. 49–72 (pp. 53, 56).

26. Terry Eagleton, ‘Lenin in the Postmodern Age’, in Sebastian Budgen, Stath-is Kouvelakis & Slavoj Žižek, eds, Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 42–58 (p. 53).

27. Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. xvii.

28. Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 58, p. 57.

29. There are a few scattered examples of such work, e.g. Lieske Tibbe, ‘ “Art and the Beauty of the Earth”: The Reception of News from Nowhere in the Low Countries’, http://home.planet.nl/~tibbe073/MORRIS2.ENG.pdf [last accessed 1 May 2013]. The link supplies an English-language version of Lieske Tibbe, ‘Nieuws uit Nergensoord: Natuursymboliek en de receptie van William Morris in Nederland en België’, De Negentiende Eeuw, vol. 25, Dec. 2001, pp. 233–251. See also, Michael Brook, ‘A Swedish-American Translator of Morris: Axel Lundberg’, JWMS, Vol. III, No. 4, Winter 1978, pp. 8–13.

30. Guarneri, ‘American Utopia’, p. 169. For a useful summary of Eduard Bern-stein’s ideas and the revisionist controversy, see the editorial introduction to Richard B. Day & Daniel Guido, eds, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, Leiden: Brill, 2009, pp. 16–24.

31. Till Schelz-Brandenburg, ed, Eduard Bernsteins Briefwechsel mit Karl Kaut-sky (1891–1895), Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2011, p. 49. I am grate-ful to Kerry Goyer for providing the translation. Engels, with whom Bern-stein was likely to have been staying, lived at Primrose Hill. Etienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840) describes a utopian commune on the island of Icaria.

32. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, new edn, London: Abacus, 1994, p. 101. (Afterwards Hobsbawm, Empire)

33. Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, London: Verso, 1980, pp. 180–85 praises Morris’s chapter on ‘How the Change Came’ as an impor-

tant contribution to Marxist strategic thought in that it oVers a Wctional description of emergent ‘dual power’, in the Leninist sense.

34. Hobsbawm, Empire, p. 129; CW, Vol. XVI, p. 66. Reference to the Clearing of Misery echoes John Ruskin’s polemic in the Wrst letter (January 1871) of Fors Clavigera (1871–1884), in which he declared his campaign to ‘abate [the] misery’ he saw around him. Ruskin also referred to his desire to ‘destroy and rebuild the Houses of Parliament, the National Gallery, and the East end of London’ – all points Morris echoed in News from Nowhere. Edward Tyas Cook & Alexander Wedderburn, eds, The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols, London: George Allen, 1903–1912, Vol. XXVII, pp. 13–15. (Afterwards Ruskin, Works)

35. CW, Vol. XVI, p. 66.36. Hobsbawm, Empire, p. 129.37. CW, XVI, p. 72; Claeys, p. 171, pp. 112–122. For discussion of Morris’s rela-

tive silence on the question of Indian independence, see Patrick Brantlinger, ‘A Postindustrial Prelude to Postcolonialism: John Ruskin, William Morris, and Gandhism’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 3, Spring 1996, pp. 466–85.

38. CW, Vol. XVI, p. 74; Vol. XVI, p. 98; Claeys, p. 171.39. Salmon, Journalism, p. 337.40. Ibid., p. 90; Salmon, Political Writings, pp. 10–13; Salmon, Journalism, pp.

99, 104–105, 230, 434, 465–456, 490, 583.41. Hobsbawm, Nationalism, p. 102; Löwy, p. 56; Hobsbawm, Empire, pp. 72,

129–30.42. August Bebel, Woman in the Past, Present and Future, trans. H.B. Adams

Walther, London: William Reeves, 1893, p. 247, p. 235; Kelvin, Vol. II, pp. 441–442.

43. H.D. Traill, ed, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols, London: Chapman and Hall, 1896, Vol. I, pp. 183–4; Vol. XXIX, pp. 203–4; Ruskin, Works, Vol. XX, p. 42.

44. Eugene D. LeMire, ed, The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969, p. 179, p. 181.

45. Ibid., p. 182.46. Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, London: Wil-

liam Blackwood & Sons, 1902, p. 57. Marlow notes that ‘[t]he conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a diVerent complexion or slightly Xatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only’.

47. In a ‘Terms of Advertising Circular’, held in the Socialist League Archives at the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), Henry Halliday Sparling wrote that Commonweal ‘circulat[ed] […] throughout Europe, America and the Colonies’ (Miller, p. 13); Richard Rive, ed, Olive Schreiner


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Letters, Volume 1: 1877–1899, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 216–217.

48. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 30.

49. Mackail, Vol. II, p. 243.50. Eugene D. LeMire, A Bibliography of William Morris, London: Oak Knoll

Press, 2006, p. lvi; p. xxix.51. H. Buxton Forman, The Books of William Morris: Described with Some

Account of His Doings in Literature and in the Allied Crafts, London: Frank Hollings, 1897, p. 151.

52. Buxton Forman’s hostility later in his text to the propagandistic agenda of the Commonweal is barely concealed; Ibid., p. 199.

53. Robert L. M. Coupe, Illustrated Editions of the Works of William Morris in English: A Descriptive Bibliography, London: Oak Knoll Press, 2002, p. 155.

Author’s Note added in the proof: One further translation, listed below, came to the author’s attention while the proofs of this article were being processed.

bulgar ian

Novini ot Nikade: Utopichen roman, trans. S. Bogdanov and G. Bazarov [Georgi Bakalov], Stara Zagora: Svetlina, 1907.

Georgi Ivanov Bakalov (1873–1939) was a Bulgarian literary critic and historian. He joined the Bulgarian Socialist Democratic Party in 1891. He was a delegate to the London and Amsterdam congresses of the Second International, held in 1894 and 1904 respectively. Between 1903 and 1905, he served on the central committee of the Bulgarian Workers’ Socialist Democratic Party (Narrow Section), but left in 1905, as the head of a group denounced as ‘anarchist-liberals’. He published other important works including Ivan Vazov and Socialism (1909) and Bulgarian Literature and Socialism (1911). I have not been able to trace the identity of S. Bogdanov.


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revisiting morris’s socialist internationalism: rexections ... · refugees in fitzroy square, set...

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